I'm not quite sure off hand how it would be done, but a thought would be taking a track that does it and listen to it very closely. If you slowed it good deal in sound forge or something first it should become quite apparent if you can just follow the insturments you are thinking about.

Virtually all synths that you can buy have an arpeggiator section.

What you do is turn the arpeggiator on, twist the tempo knob to the tempo of your track and then play chords until you get something you like - most synths have a selection of patterns but by far the most common in trance is straight semi-quavers.

I use a JP-8080 but any synth should be able to do this as standard - if it can't you can get the same effect by programming a similar pattern in Logic or Cubase (in fact Logic has an arpeggiator object in the environment which you can use to get the same effect, maybe Cubase has something similar).

If you want your melody to have arpeggios, pick three notes from a chord and then the fourth note (usually top note as you said) changes every bar and is taken from your melody. I'm pretty sure that's the effect you're after - it's also pretty standard to put delay on it too and this is what produces the padding effect you talk about.

When you say multiple synth lines, you should make sure you only arpeggiate one part because otherwise your mix will sound like a complete squashed mush. Try combining the arpeggios with a short stab synth to add syncopation and give the mix more life.

thanks

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Guys, perhaps I should illustrate what I meant by "padding," "lower line," etc.:



I took this snapshot as I was editing a PERCSYN (synth) line in FruityLoops. I was trying to create this note-swirl apreggio, my results weren't too good. As you can see the upper, main notes are unevenly distributed, and all I did was pad the remaining space with lower notes. Then I added some variety to the upper line, so that it wouldn't be all one note.

However, I didn't use any time-delay here. Are you saying that I should get rid of the lower synth line and add time-delay instead?

Thanks.

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Yeah, what you've done there is right - don't get rid of the lower line.

Instead, add delay which is roughly a semiquaver delay and this'll smooth out the bottom line and make the top line sound more prominent. A nice way to do this is to pan the main line slightly to one side and then pan its delay slightly to the other side.